I'm using DOSBox 0.70 on a Core 2 Duo E6600 with an ATI X1300 and 1gb RAM.

Apologies if this is a newbie question, but I've read through the Guides forum, the FAQ on the Dosbox site, the readme, the small info in the .conf file AND searched extensively on both VOGONS and Google, and I still for the life of me cannot find any information about the various output methods and which one is the best/fastest. There is zero documentation on the output setting, and nobody really seems to talk about it except for the odd passing comment, so I figured I might as well just ask myself as apparently it's a very important setting:

What does each one do?
Is surface bad?
Do they use DirectX?
Which is best for an ATI card?
What is openglnb and what does it stand for?
Fullscreen/window differences?
etc etc.

OGL/D3D really aren't that usefull unless you want to use pixel shaders. (D3D not supported in Official DosBox).

Surface-Default setting because it's most compatible across all platforms. Nothing bad about it except that it doesn't support scaling.

overlay=Uses scaling.
ddraw=Uses DirectDraw. Supports scaling. If using 2000/XP/2003 probably faster than surface. (I've never seen a difference, mabye if someone wrote some synthetic benchmark they could see a difference)

Surface/Overlay use GDI I think. DDraw uses Directx (DirectDraw)

Opengl=Uses OpenGL. Also uses bilinear filtering which blurs the screen.
openglnb=Uses OpenGL. Does not use bilinear filtering so pixels are pixelated.

/EDIT Fixed

You have an ATI card so it's generally not recommended to use OPENGL.

You will see people say that there is a difference between fullscreen/window as far as speed but I've never seen a difference. There are tons of video cards/driver combinations out there so it's always a possibility.

I use an ATI card in Windows and I stick with Surface/Overlay. Always works fine for me. D3d isn't officially supported. OGL is terrible with ATI because ATI are shitty driver writers. I also use Vista and since GDI/ddraw isn't accelerated in Vista as it is in 2000/XP/2003 there really isn't a reason to use ddraw.

Last edited by DosFreak on 2007-3-07 @ 11:20, edited 2 times in total.

Thanks a lot Dosfreak and MiniMax . I'll use surface from now on because I don't use any scalers, which I think is why people were suggesting overlay because they had a scaler set.

Would OpenGL act kind of like an OGL patch for a game though?. I mean, if I ran System Shock 1 in Dosbox under OpenGL, would it smooth the wall textures?. I can't test it right now because that Core 2 computer in my post is actually the one I use at Uni (hence why it has the X1300). My comp at home is a useless P3 450 and an ATI Rage